It has been 16 years since Rosenberg, a journalist, achieved fame with her book The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism. Because of it, she won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer and another that comes with oodles of cash, the MacArthur “genius” designation. Readers wondered what she would produce as an encore to The Haunted Land. Now they know.

OK, Rosenberg is an advocate for social change. But social change can occur in many, many ways. So why choose peer pressure?

Rosenberg’s path to the social cure is instructive. In a general sense, she wanted to write more about solutions to the seemingly intractable problems she had been exposing for decades. This led her to examine the disintegrating Yugoslavia. She focused on Ivan Marovic, a student during the 1990s and into the current century, who helped form a group called Otpor, a word meaning “resistance” in Serbian. Rosenberg came to believe that Otpor ignited a movement responsible for the demise of dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

After that, Rosenberg learned, Marovic and other Otpor organizers traveled to other nations to share their methods for nonviolent change.

“What made Otpor different from every other democracy movement I had ever seen was that it focused on stripping away the fear, fatalism and passivity that keep a dictator’s subjects under oppression,” Rosenberg writes. “Otpor turned passivity into action by making it easy — even cool — to become a revolutionary. The movement branded itself with hip slogans and graphics and rock music. Instead of long speeches, Otpor relied on humor and street theater that mocked the regime.”

Peer pressure of the positive kind allowed Otpor to grow. “People joined the movement for the same reason they go to the hot bar of the moment,” Rosenberg writes.

She realized she had seen something similar in South Africa: an AIDS-prevention program called loveLife. It was “to the classic public-health approach what Otpor is to the typical political party,” Rosenberg observes. Rather than relying on the unimaginative dissemination of depressing information, loveLife’s leaders aimed to create an “aspirational life-style brand” using celebrity gossip, music, fashion, school sports and relationship advice, among other tools. In such a group, according to Rosenberg, “a girl can hear from another girl — from a similarly bleak and dusty township — why and how she rejected a boyfriend who demanded sex without a condom. And she will think about doing the same.”

Looking beyond Yugoslavia and South Africa, Rosenberg noticed examples across the globe that seemed like a paradigm to her, despite the widely varying subject matters.

To Rosenberg, it began to seem obvious that peer pressure could achieve wonders. After all, peer pressure has always worked to achieve negative results –violent street gangs, suicide pacts, high-school dropouts, persecution of minorities.

Turning peer pressure on its head might equalize its negative power.

Throughout Join the Club, Rosenberg grapples with the shortcomings of this new peer pressure paradigm. She is wise to do so, because not every social problem can be solved by the social cure.

To play devil’s advocate, I would suggest that the social cure is quite likely to be ineffective if used to increase the construction of new low-cost housing in a city; housing construction is a big-ticket spending item. The combination of private-sector drive for substantial profit and constricted government budgets would seem fatal.

Furthermore, some social problems such as combating global terrorism might prove susceptible to change theoretically, but the appropriate visionaries have not emerged to organize a movement — and might never emerge. In her final chapter, Rosenberg posits how the social cure might alleviate global terrorism, and theoretically her thinking offers promise. But on a practical level, her reasoning feels like reaching.